"My fight for the liberation of sound and for my right to make music with any sound and all sounds has sometimes been construed as a desire to disparage and even to discard the great music of the past. But that is where my roots are. No matter how original, how different a composer may seem, he has only grafted a little bit of himself on the old plant. But this he should be allowed to do without being accused of wanting to kill the plant. He only wanted to produce a new flower."

New Worlds of Edgard Varese
(by Elliott Carter (Editor), Sherman Van Solkema (Editor), Wen-Chung Chou)
Papers and Discussion from a Varese Symposium at the City University of New York (I.S.A.M. Monographs, No. 11.)